


The Mermaid and the Man

by elytraheart



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst, Best Friends, Bittersweet Ending, Character Death, Emotional Manipulation, Fantasy, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Hybrids, Magic, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:08:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29380431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elytraheart/pseuds/elytraheart
Summary: Fate doesn't get much crueller than watching a mermaid, who can't leave the water, and an enderman, who can't touch the water, become best friends.They make it work, of course; meeting at the shore every morning, exchanging stories and any other sign of friendship they can. Everything is okay, for a little while.It's hard, though, knowing you can never share each other's happiest moments or be there for their saddest. It's hard resisting the temptation to change that through whatever means possible.
Relationships: Niki | Nihachu & Ranboo
Comments: 10
Kudos: 215





	The Mermaid and the Man

**Author's Note:**

> this is inspired by ranboo and niki's powers on their new modded smp. all abilities described here, whether good or bad, are taken directly from the official descriptions of their powers from the mod.
> 
> this is a fic about two best friends who may be slightly reliant on each other due to having no other friends. if you take it as any more than platonic, you're disgusting and you'd be better off staying far away from my page.
> 
> second warning, this does describe in a little bit of detail how water hurts ranboo. if you're not comfortable with such descriptions of pain (i tagged it as mild gore just in case) please click off now!
> 
> follow me on twitter @elytraheart for updates! this is a oneshot, but i'm currently updating a multi chaptered fic on the smp called ‘eight’ and if you like this story, you'll probably like that one!
> 
> thanks for clicking, and enjoy the story :)

He couldn't remember how long he'd been sitting there.

How had it been raining all day? The wooden platform above him was starting to rot away under the pressure and every so often a splinter or two would hit the dewy patch of grass next to him. Every so often it would drip and he'd curl in upon himself even closer, gritting his teeth in preparation for pain that never came.

He mulled over his options. Teleport somewhere off into the distance and hope he landed in shelter—whixh offered a high risk and low chance—or sit here for God knows how long, maybe hours, maybe days, waiting for the rain to stop. Or he could just book it, since he knew his house wasn't too far from here; if he ran fast enough he might survive the rain and just be in excruciating agony instead.

At some point he must've given up and fallen asleep, because he woke up both in great pain from sprawling out on the wet ground and in the discomfort of knowing he was no longer alone. A girl whose hair was dry in the rain and whose fingers appeared to be webbed like a frog's had somehow found her way to him and was picking flowers and humming like he wasn't even there.

_Mermaid_. He had known mermaids existed, remembered taking a particular interest in them in the encyclopaedia of origins, but he'd never actually met one. For a brief, blissful moment he considered saying hello—and then he remembered he had social anxiety. And also couldn't leave from under this platform.

He watched her for a while as he waited for the rain to go away. At some points, he thought maybe she noticed his eyes following her, but she never glanced in his direction and seemed entirely focused on the flower fields stretched out in front of her. Was it weird, what he was doing? Was his first impression on this server going to be as some creep who watched girls go about their days?

As if to break the tension in his mind, the clouds began to grow more sparsely and brightly, and the rain ceased to fall. For a moment, he smiled, and finally uncurled his body and stepped out into the daytime. The moment was broken when he looked at the girl with the flowers. _Mermaids need water_. He watched as she began to choke and clutch at her throat, maybe not from an immediate response to the open air but out of her own panic. The nearest water source is miles away.

Convenient, he thought, that this happened around the only guy on the server who could teleport. He made his way over to her as fast as humanly (endermanly?) possible, and she met his eyes for the first time, hers bloodshot and streaky and his wide and desperate. She seemed to know what he was trying to do and clutched onto him as if he were her lifeline. Carrying her weight took a lot of concentration and made it immensely more difficult to teleport, but he would never tell her that, especially not now as he was saving her life. He closed his eyes, and willed hard.

When he opened them again, he couldn't see. Pain seared across his entire body and though he knew he was encased in water, all he saw was red. He could distantly hear the mermaid talking in his ear, thanking him, praising him, but all he knew how to do was grit his teeth and try to make it to the shore. His arm slipped out from under her, too weak to carry her any longer.

“Sir?” said the mermaid tentatively, more audible now as the ringing in his ears began to clear. He hadn't even noticed they had been ringing. “Are— are you okay? Uh—”

He held up his free hand as a silencing motion, the other preoccupied with trying to get the scorching cold water out of his ear. “I'm alright, I'm alright, I'm— I'm okay. Sorry.” He'd never felt pain like that before. Sure, he'd gotten surprised by rain before, but never had he been submerged in the ocean like that. He envisioned his body was smouldering before his very eyes.

“I was, um—” she laughed, more out of nerves than him saying anything funny—“I was just saying thank you for saving me. You didn't have to do that. You know, since we aren't friends or anything. Unless you want to be? I don't really have many friends, and you seemed lonely under that wooden thing, so…”

He considered it for a moment. “But you can't go out of water. How would we— how would it work?” Then he considered further, being the smart man that he was. “I guess we could just sit by the shore like this in the mornings, before everybody else wakes up. Could be nice.”

“Exactly!” said the mermaid, beaming up at him. “Well. I guess friendships have to start somewhere, right? My name's Niki. And, uh, I'm a mermaid. You might have noticed that part.” She offered her hand, and as it broke the surface of the water and above it didn't drip or shimmer at all. It was dry, he marvelled as he shook it.

There was an awkward silence. Only for a second or two, but long enough that he wanted to melt into the ground and disappear permanently. “Oh, sorry. I'm Ranboo. Enderman. That's why I can't go in water. And why I was under that platform for so long, like you saw.” _You're embarrassing yourself. This is your first friend, and you're embarrassing yourself._

“Oh! Sorry for assuming you were just lonely. I didn't know you couldn't, uh, touch water.” She paused. “Wait, so when we were in the water there now—”

Ranboo grimaced, not liking where this was going. He hated to be pitied more than anything else in the world; something about it just made his skin crawl. “Yeah, it hurt.” Without meaning to he rubbed his smouldering forearm. The slight movement didn't go unnoticed.

“I'm sorry.” For a moment Niki was timid, but she immediately breezed over it and tried to laugh it off. “Not the best first impression I could've made, was it? I guess I just wandered too far. Like an idiot.” Something in her face darkened when she said that, or her eyes lowered, or her jaw set. Whatever it was, it felt wrong.

“No one can predict the weather,” said Ranboo firmly. “I'm glad I was there, because I was the best person to help. And because now we get to be friends.”

Niki smiled sheepishly, and that was that. Perhaps if either of them had known how easy it was to form lifelong friendships, they would've done it before now. Perhaps if they had learnt it when everybody else did, they wouldn't still be lamenting the loss of their childhoods to loneliness to this day.

Regardless, brighter things lay in the future. Every morning Ranboo would wake up no longer dreading another day of being awake and present, but instead strapping on his boots and making his way to the ocean shore with the soft dawn illuminating his back. And every morning Niki would already be there, beaming up at him the way she always did, just happy to have a friend.

She was making renovations in a lagoon, she told him on one of the earlier days. It was obviously a passion project and Ranboo tried not to make his disinterest too obvious but instead to listen attentively, and it seemed to work. He even found himself starting to get invested in its progress, and coming back the next day asking what was new with it.

“I wish I could show you,” she said now, and for once she wasn't smiling up at him. She was just… sitting. Making eye contact the same way she always did, but looking like she'd rather not. “I made a room for you to stay in if you ever stopped by. Even though I know you never will, because you can't.” Suddenly she was welling up and throwing her arms around his neck in a smothering hug, and he, taken aback and slightly frightened by the display of affection, tried to hug back, albeit stiffly and awkwardly. He could feel her shaking.

“You would love it,” she said into his shoulder, voice surprisingly stable for somebody who was both crying their eyes out and unable to breath the air they were in. “It has all the flowers I picked on the day we met, and a platform I made out of coral to match the platforms you use to keep out of the rain, and— God, don't you just hate how I'm trapped here and you're trapped there? Do you never wish you could breathe underwater?”

Ranboo bit his lip. The truth was that he did, very often, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to admit that yet or not, to confront that part of himself that didn't care about the pain because it hurt more to be separated from his best—and only—friend. But Niki trusted him so freely, so openly, he felt like it was only right to show her the same trust back. He chose his next words carefully. “One day… one day I'll get to see it. I promise.”

He felt her tense. Uh-oh. “How?” 

There was an edge to her voice. What had he done to make her suspicious? “Technology is adapting every day, and so is my power. I'm sure at some point they'll find a way to get me into water, even if it's only for a short time. I mean, I was completely submerged in the ocean the day we met, and I was fine.”

_No, you weren't. You went home and cried for 3 hours straight because you were in such excruciating pain and had to hide it from everybody around you._

Niki said pretty much the same thing, minus the parts he had never told her. He didn't want her pity, remember? He'd rather have anything else. Remember?

“It'll be worth it,” he insisted. “No matter what happens, no matter how much it hurts, I'll see your lagoon the day it's finished and I'll give myself the tour and I'll look around the room you made for me and it'll be an amazing day for both of us, just you wait.” _Are you trying to convince her, or yourself?_

She still looked uneasy, but she let the subject drop and the conversation flowed into smoother, safer waters. Good. He felt like he was hiding something, but couldn't seem to put his finger on what. He wasn't doing anything wrong, he had been trying to reassure her.

After that, Niki seemed less eager to talk about the lagoon, but Ranboo gently pushed her to open up as best he could, asking simple questions with easy answers and leaving brief silences after she spoke so she'd continue talking. It was the little things, he thought to himself as he watched how her face lit up when he told her the green stained glass had definitely been a better choice than the blue. _So this is what having a friend feels like._

But it wasn't _fair_ , and it kept him up at night that she could never come visit and he could never tour the lagoon and they could only ever see each other in the same fucking place day after day. It was just his luck that his best friend would be the only person on the server who couldn't do something as simple as walking on land. Even Wilbur, a literal fucking _ghost_ , could if he turned invisible. 

He cried about it once. It hurt. It felt like somebody had struck a match and was now trailing it slowly, gently, painfully down his cheek, and laughing while they did it. The more he cried, the more he clawed at his own skin, begging the pain to stop. _It's not fair it's not fair it's not fair. Please stop._ He cried until his chest hurt and his lungs gave out and his head was pounding and it took everything in him to get out of bed the next morning and go to the shore.

Nobody else on the server cared about him. They all had their own little groups now, all their own lives, and Tubbo hadn't spoken to him in weeks ever since Tommy and Wilbur moved into houses nearby. He had no one. Not a single fucking soul on this land would even notice if he was gone.

But Niki. Niki, in the water, had dedicated her life to decorating this lagoon, and she had dedicated an entire room in it to him, to them. He tried to ignore the fact that she'd done the same for Wilbur. What mattered was the time she spent thinking of him and creating that for him, even trying to reconstruct one of the platforms he used to shelter from the rain.

Niki cared. And if nobody on the land cared, why not join her in the water? Plus, he'd always promised her that one day he would see the lagoon. Now, he would.

Before he knew what he was doing he was out of his bed and reaching out towards the doorknob. But the door flew open of its own accord, flung that way by the raging wind outside, and revealed Niki hovering on the doorstep, having just arrived too, still completely dry despite the rain lashing down upon her. If she was surprised to see him, he was certainly surprised to see her.

“I brought an umbrella,” she croaked, teeth chattering. Despite her apparent disregard for the rain, she still felt the cold. “I thought we could go on a walk. I wanted to talk to you about something.” She held up her unopened umbrella as if to prove she wasn't lying about bringing one.

“Niki, I— I want to see the lagoon.” He sounded breathless, when really he'd just woken up. Funny how bad weather will do that to you. Not the time. 

The umbrella clattered to the ground. Embarrassed, Niki picked it back up, but her hands had started shaking again. Whether it was out of anger, fear, or upset, it remained to be seen. How did he manage to fuck up constantly? “You can't. Water hurts you, kills you even. I'm not letting you put yourself through that for one stupid room. I'll take pictures one day, Ranboo, I'll show you them. I'll take bits and pieces to the shore and show you them, anything you ask for. But you're not going to the lagoon. We've been _over_ this.”

Ranboo hesitated, and then was struck by a sudden bolt of inspiration. “But Niki, I did some research, and apparently saltwater doesn't affect endermen the way freshwater does. So it's perfectly safe and fine for me to go to a lagoon! And we can swim around, and we can tour your underwater house, and I can finally see the room you made for me.”

“What kind of research?”

Shoot. He'd underestimated her. He'd expected her to be excited over finally getting to show him what she'd created, regardless of how believable his argument was. He'd expected her to be blinded by—by, what, friendship? Something cliché like that? Maybe he hadn't underestimated her after all, but had instead overestimated himself.

He resorted to the only form of persuasion he knew. “Niki, please, just trust me. I wouldn't lie to you, would I? After everything I've done for you, everything we've done for each other?”

Niki chewed her lip until she drew blood, and then some more. “I do trust you. I just don't know… I've been doing research on your power too, and I don't remember seeing anything about different types of water affecting them differently. What I did see was that sometimes, when you're more enderman than person, you can start acting—”

“Niki. If you don't let me go to the lagoon, I'll go there by myself, and you won't be able to stop me in time. So we either go together now, or you leave me to fend for myself out there in the water. I'm doing this for you, Niki. Why can't you fucking see that?”

She was tearing up again. Why did she have to cry all the fucking time? “Ranboo…”

He didn't even give her time to finish. He snatched the umbrella from her stark white fist and stormed out of the small house into the rain, leaving only silence and the small, shaking frame of a mermaid in the doorway.

Almost immediately, he regretted it. The rain tore at his skin in ways he hadn't even imagined possible, breathing down his neck and chewing on his heart. He remembered a dream he'd once had where he ran into a house fire to save the screaming child within it, only to find out there was nobody there at all, and he himself began to scream just the way the child had. It was a small fraction of how he felt now.

Nearly there, he told himself, giving himself claps on the back every now and then for his perseverance. He was probably the first enderman to ever make it this far in the rain. Of course, he could've just opened the umbrella and this all would've been solved, but then he wouldn't be able to stroke his own ego and that was the best part. He only took the stupid fucking umbrella in the first place because it meant something to Niki, and he wanted to hurt her. He wasn't sure why he wanted to hurt her, but he knew she deserved it, because he was a reasonable person who only hurt people if they deserved it.

And finally, finally, he reached the lagoon. He knew it was the one she had been talking about because of the pale light breaking the water's surface from the sea lanterns she'd placed beneath. He took a deep breath, sucked in the clean, fresh air. Oxygen. He'd breathe it again, soon, but for now he just had to make it into the water in the first place.

He dived in.

If the rain had been bad, this was a million times worse. He screamed for Niki until his throat was raw and ravaged, begging her to come back, to forgive him and to save him, to get him out of here please because oh god oh god it hurts so bad and all he wanted was to see what she'd created for him and she was right about the way he acted when he went full endermen and she was right about him never going to the lagoon and she had always been right about everything she'd said to him but he'd never appreciated it before; how could he have never appreciated her before?

“Niki, Niki, Niki, please, please, where are you, please,” he murmured through choked breaths every time he came up for air, searching for the room that was his. He'd assumed he'd know it when he saw it, like some kind of inherent friendship thing they had in the movies, but every room here looked the exact same.

“Niki, please help me, I can't hold myself here any longer, I can't swim, this is all my fault, I should've listened, I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry and I'll say it until I'm dead no matter how soon that will be—” he sucked in a sudden gasp and was pulled back into the waves, and as he did something jumped out at him, something red and glowing. He knew what it was the second he laid eyes upon it: it was his.

He allowed the water to pull him deeper and deeper into its depths, eyes closed so he didn't feel it tugging and clawing at them, and latched his hands onto the nearest pole the second he found himself near one. Open eyes: there he was. What he had been searching for.

It was beautiful.

***

It stopped raining eventually, but Niki never left Ranboo's house. She could feel the air being sucked from her lungs gradually as if with a vacuum, but she tidied away his things and folded his clothes and made his bed and set the table and wrote him a little post-it note on the fridge just on the off chance he ever did come home.

She was found sleeping on his sofa a few days later, by the same people who came trailing in a wet umbrella and a missing person's notice, until she wasn't asleep anymore. Until she was never going to wake up.

And, in a way, it was beautiful, like Ranboo had thought in his last moments. Because now they were together, not separated by land or sea or stupid abilities that were more curses than they were powers. They could spend as much as time with their best friend as they wanted, no matter where they were. They were together, just not in the place either of them had wanted to be; and they were happy, just not their own definitions of it.


End file.
